Audubon House and Tropical Gardens

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The Audubon House & Tropical Gardens is located at 205 Whitehead Street, Key West, Florida.

Brick-pathed gardens offer a lush one-acre view of orchids, bromeliads and other tropical foliage, an herb garden and 1840-style nursery.

The house has many antique furnishings purchased from estate sales and auctions in Europe.

The house contains 28 first edition works of the famous ornithologist John James Audubon. Audubon visited the Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas in 1832 and left Key West having sighted and drawn 18 new birds for his "Birds of America" folio. It is believed that many of those drawings were conceived in the Audubon House garden. Also, Audubon's painting of the white-crowned pigeon features the Geiger tree found in the front yard of the house.

The Audubon House Gallery, separate from the main house features a unique collection of 19th century original Audubon art and a comprehensive selection of John James Audubon's images.

[edit] History

The house was built by Captain John H. Geiger, a harbor pilot and master wrecker, who lived in the house with his wife and nine children, during an era when shipwrecks occurred daily on the off-shore reef.

The house was slated for demolition in 1958, but was saved by the Mitchell Wolfson Family Foundation, a nonprofit educational institution. This was the first restoration project in Key West.^[1]